Narrator:
Throughout the universe, the galaxies are distancing themselves 
from one another, rushing apart at phenomenal speeds, signaling 
their departure by a shift in the red end of their light spectra.
Edwin Hubble measured the red shiftt in 1929 and thus rendered
impossible the idea of a static universe.
Rainer Maria Rilke, having died in 1926 of leukemia in a sanatorium near
Monireax, did not know about the red shift or about Hubble’s discovery.
Yet in his Eighth Elegy, Rilke personalized a phenomenon of universal
significance, intuiting something of extraordinary magnitude. He
concludes his Elegy with the following lines:

 Who has twisted us around this way so that
 no matter what we do, we are in the posture
 of someone going away? Like someone upon
 the farthest hill who is shown his whole valley,
 one more time, he turns, stops, lingers --,
 so we live and forever take our leave.
 Wer hat uns also umgedreht, daß wir,
 was wir auch tun, in jener Haltung sind
 von einem, welcher fortgeht? Wie er auf
 dem letzten Hügel, der ihm ganz sein Tal
 noch einmal zeigt, sich wendet, anhält, weilt —,
 so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied.

*How the red shift is measured: The sound of a train whistle as
it approaches us not only becomes louder but higher and higher in pitch.
Conversely, as it moves away from us, it becomes lower in pitch. This is
the Doppler Effect and it applies to light-emitting sources as well as sound.
As light-emitting sources, such as celestial bodies, move away from the
observer there is a lengthening of the wavelengths at the red end of the
spectrum. The amount of lengthening, or red shift, is proportional to the
distance from the observation paint. From these measurements was born
the paradigm of the expanding universe and the Big Bang.